Contests & Promotions

This is a combined report. As neither my review of the non-monocolored cards in SOK nor my tourney report for the prerelease I attended would be much of an article on their own, I’m combining the two. I’ll do the card review first, and the tourney report will be down below.

A word about my reviews from here on out. First, as most reviewers go thru the color wheel W-U-B-R-G-Other, I will instead go in reverse. You’ll also notice that each card now has 3 grades rather than 1. This is done to better reflect a cards value, so that a card which is a Limited bomb but is Constructed trash, or vice versa, won’t be unfairly graded. The Overall grade is not just a composite of Limited and Constructed grades; if a card will be treasured by Johnnies or fills a niche in Magic that no previous card has, or is a bad repeat of a previous card, it will be reflected in the Overall grade.

Limited: D Constructed: C+ Overall: B-At 12 mana the only way it’s coming out of your hand is if you have tricks, which means it’s improbable in Limited and requires cards to work with it in Constructed. Sure, you can reanimate it, but you lose half the cards attributes; you’d be better off with Darksteel Colossus

Limited: C+ Constructed: C Overall: C-In Limited, if you have lots of Soulshift, you can make all your dead critters spirits and thus eligible for return. But this neat trick doesn’t seem Constructed worthy to me.

Limited: C+ Constructed: C- Overall: B-Why couldn’t this card have been around back during the days of Necro? Marginal use in drafts with Saviors, but otherwise opponents can easily deal with it. The only reason I’d keep one is because my Mom likes owls.

l counterpart. Control decks will like getting that 4 life all the time to counter beatdown decks, as they are likely to keep their hands big. If this was around during the time of Necro, Necro would have been even scarier than before.

ari Limited: B Constructed: B- Overall: B+Oh, how I loved this card at the Prerelease. It kills other equipment, so I can definitely see this card being used a lot to get rid of opposing Jittes. Even without an opponent having killer equipment, it’s still a solid card to boost your own creatures.

O-Naginata Limited: B- Constructed: C Overall: C+It makes your fatties that should already have trample, but don’t, get trample and an additional +3/+0 to boot. A solid card for Limited, but too unreliable in Constructed.

Limited: B- Constructed: A- Overall: A-I can’t believe this card got printed as is. It is a potential main deck card in any constructed deck as it screws with other people’s deck. In Limited can only screw one potential card of your opponents and you never know if it’s the right card to really use it on, and it’s rare, so it’ll have minimal impact.

Limited: C Constructed: C+ Overall: C+What, no matching Scroll of Gen Con? :) Anyways, I think decks that would use this card already have better options than this card, like the Top, which goes into any deck. This card is too limiting in what it can do.

Limited: C- Constructed: D- Overall: FYUCK!!! Seven mana for a one-shot effect that’s only really useful on a giant trampling creature? At the time of writing this review, where I have already rated black, red, and green cards for future articles, I rate this as the worst card in SOK.

Limited: C- Constructed: C+ Overall: B-Well, this card is not bad if you need a splash of blue or you need some tricks against Ponza, but usually its best just to use counterspells versus Ponza. Neat idea for a land, through.

This was my first time going to an Indianapolis premier event not ran by Simply Magic, but Pastimes instead. I was curious how the attendance would be, due to the different formats. I saw very few people I recognized, compared to normal. After all, there are 3-4 other alternative prereleases that someone who used to go to the Indy to go to, depending on their location. They had a hard time getting the fifth flight started, and were struggling for a 6th one to start when I left. I was in flight 2, which started the same time as the fourth flight, whereas the third flight started before us. The deck I registered had great COK red burn and Celestial Kirin

, which I hated giving up. The deck I got back had great black removal, but the creatures were bad. The white had lots of Kitsune, but seemed to alien to my style to use. I thought about using the red, but I noticed that my blue creatures were consistently strong, so I decided to go mostly-blue with a black splash. My deck:

R/W2-1 Due to all his white control and a huge flyer, I lost.2-2 I used Seizan to good use, mostly for killing him with life lost rather than actually getting to attack successfully with Seizan2-3 I was in a precarious situation, but time is called before I faced defeat. George would not win his next round. I got lucky for once

Round 3 David Wagner R/W/U3-1 I got in some rapid beats, and then Seizan life loss settles it.3-2 I let him get Godo, because I knew I could copy it with Sakashima. After confusing him many times with how Sakashima works, like how it copied a Legend but stays around, and has all sorts of neat effects, I easily won.